The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (2 page)

 
1.

MAY 31, 2013
.

One by one they each gazed up at—and then hurried past—the eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Woody Hayes, posed leaning slightly forward with his hands on his hips, standing in front of the Ohio State athletic center bearing his name. Few of the two dozen QB gurus arriving from all over the country for a 6:00 p.m. Friday meeting stopped to check out the Buckeyes’ seven Heisman Trophies positioned in the lobby. Inside the 53,000-square-foot complex, past the trophy cases and all the framed mantras, they made a beeline for the Buckeyes’ team room, where the far-flung coaches were assembling.

The room is part theater, part classroom. It is where Urban Meyer meets with his players. The Ohio State coach had handed over the Buckeyes’ facilities for the weekend’s Elite 11 Super Regional event—part of what’s become the
American Idol
of quarterbacking. Starting with the high school Class of 2000, the Elite 11 “campetition” has produced, among other future first-round draft picks, Tim Tebow, Matthew Stafford, and Andrew Luck.

The evening’s first speaker was Steve Stenstrom, a dark-haired, slender Stanford grad with the air of an aspiring senator. Few of the men seated around the room knew it, but the forty-one-year-old
Stenstrom, not John Elway or Andrew Luck, had been Stanford’s all-time leading passer. Stenstrom had bounced around the NFL, playing for five teams in six seasons. For the past decade, he’s headed a Christian outreach program for coaches and pro athletes.

Stenstrom thanked everyone for being on time, and then he expanded on his background. He has a wife. Four kids. He coaches his son’s Pop Warner football team. He was brought there to Ohio State to be a part of the event by his friend Trent Dilfer, another former NFL quarterback. At Stanford, he had the privilege of playing for the legendary Bill Walsh. The ultimate coach, he said. But more than that, an innovator.

“Innovators change the landscape for the rest of us,” Stenstrom told the room. “I love—
luuuuuve
—spending time with innovators. I just get excited being around them, because they’re doing something on the cutting edge. They just see things differently. They’re just wired that way, and they’re being who they’re supposed to be.”

Stenstrom had grown close to Dilfer over the past few years, he said, from their weekly breakfasts together (both former NFL quarterbacks had retired to Northern California). Stenstrom compared the journeyman ex–NFL QB to the sainted Walsh.

“Trent’s helping innovate the quarterback landscape for all of us,” Stenstrom said. “And, in the context of this room, there’s some pretty exciting stuff happening around the quarterback space.”

As Stenstrom continued, it was apparent that in a room packed with former quarterbacks—ranging from career NFL backups to small-college starters—the night would be long on hope and hyperbole. The imagery all around the Ohio State athletic center reflected a similar, relentlessly positive, chest-up spirit. The signage on the wall right above the podium promoted a formula of sorts:
BELIEVE
>​
EXPECT
>​
ATTITUDE
>​
BEHAVIOR
=
PERFORMANCE
.

Stenstrom’s intro lasted seven minutes, but before he called up Dilfer to the podium, he left the group with a prediction.

“I believe in life there are three different kinds of days,” he said. “Mundane days. Memorable days. And milestone days.

“ ‘Mundane’ are most of our days. You’ve gotta go through the mundane to get to the memorable and the milestone days. Days,
weeks later, you have no idea what you did on a mundane day. The memorable days are the ones you usually have to plan for and script a little bit, where you try to create a memory. But every once in a while, milestones happen. Those are the days, you’re talking about ’em five, ten years down the road. I love when I get a sense that there might be a milestone day unfolding.”

Stenstrom walked back to his seat to applause as his buddy took the front of the room.

The 6′4″, 250-pound Dilfer, with his shaved head and goatee, looked more like a middle linebacker than an old quarterback. His narrow eyes, often appearing to be squinting, to be sizing you up, ratcheted up his intense presence. He’d ended his fourteen-year NFL career and transitioned immediately into the broadcast booth, where he had emerged as a bigger star on TV than he ever was in the NFL—much the way that many of the best coaches weren’t necessarily the best players. Dilfer knew enough to know what he hadn’t known back when he was a player. He had become consumed by the successes and failings of the quarterback world.

More so than any other position in football and in all of pro sports, quarterback is an identity. Guys play first base or power forward. You don’t
play
quarterback. You
are
a quarterback. The key element of being a quarterback is external, and that, too, is a big reason TV producers love Trent Dilfer. His blunt demeanor was honed by two decades spent trying to command rooms bubbling over with testosterone and cluttered with other alpha males. Rooms like the one we were in.

“What started as an idea is going to culminate tomorrow,” Dilfer began matter-of-factly. “I promise you, what Steve said is true. Tomorrow will be a milestone day. Tomorrow,” he continued as his voice rose, “the landscape of youth development and evaluation in the quarterback space changes forever. ’Cause once you do something like we’re going to do tomorrow with the group of people in this room, you can’t ever go back. Once you taste something so good, you don’t want the thing that was good before the great thing.

“There’s a couple of different conversations that we’ll have tonight, but from my perspective, it’s all one topic: It’s getting the
most from the least and the best from the best, because that’s my passion.”

Dilfer had been the front man for Elite 11 for almost three years. But he was more than just the on-air face of a reality TV show on ESPN. His vision for where “the quarterback space” could go was different from what any of his bosses could’ve imagined when they asked him to be involved two and a half years earlier.

The Elite 11 was created in 1999 by a former wide receiver at Cal as a nationwide search to find—and mentor—the best high school quarterbacks in the senior class. Andy Bark, the founder of the media company Student Sports, Inc., came up with the idea after observing a huge disparity in the quarterbacks who showed up for the football camps that SSI ran nationwide. Many top prospects were sons of former big-time quarterbacks or coaches, or had been coached by private tutors from the time they were toddlers. Bark’s goal was to help the guys who might fall through the cracks. The man Trent Dilfer replaced as the Elite 11’s lead instructor was sixty-something-year-old Bob Johnson, a crotchety, Orange County, California–based high school coach who had developed his former NFLer son, Rob Johnson, as well as Carson Palmer, Mark Sanchez, and two other QBs who made it to the NFL, Jordan Palmer and Steve Stenstrom. For a decade, Johnson’s primary focus with the young quarterbacks had been leading on-field drills. Dilfer, though, would be much more invested in the process. There would be more film study, more technique, an NFL-based playbook to learn, and anything Dilfer or his associates could conjure up to test the quarterbacks’ competitive souls. He even added a “high-performance psychology” coach who had trained six gold medalists in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

Dilfer was brought on when ESPN turned the Elite 11 into a reality TV show in 2011.
Elite 11
—for the first time in the thirteen-year history of the camp—would no longer mean only landing an invitation to Southern California. Instead, twenty-four quarterbacks were brought out to Pepperdine University to compete in front of ESPN’s TV cameras and Dilfer’s glare. Tears were shed—by Dilfer, who often would get choked up addressing his quarterbacks. Since then,
Elite 11
has tweaked its format (in 2013, eighteen quarterbacks were picked
to compete on the reality show, and they were doing so in Beaverton, Oregon, home of the posh Nike campus) and has grown in scope and drama.

The show is a cross between
The Real World
and
Hard Knocks
, only starring seventeen-year-old jocks. College coaches privately try to pick Dilfer and his staff’s brains for intel on kids they’re recruiting.

“When Andy asked me to take this thing over, it was already best-in-class,” Dilfer told the QB coaches. “There’s no doubt, the Elite 11 [camp] was best-in-class, but it had to be best-in-class
and
a TV show, and that’s not easy. It could not lose its authenticity. There’s people in this room who, two months into it, thought I was off my rocker, and I know who you are. They said, ‘You’re gonna get us all fired. It’s crazy, what you’re trying to do.’ But I kept pushing the envelope. I knew the player wanted more. I knew the coach wanted more. I knew the audience wanted more.

“What’s happened over time is, what started as a camp has now become a cult. We’re making a change with the kids, and to me, that’s good. I settled for ‘good’ as a player. I was just good. Never great.

“Good,” Dilfer repeated, with a tinge of disgust.

“I am
not
going to settle for good with this. We’re going to be great. It is going to be great. We’re gonna take it to the community. At some point this is going to be a thirteen-week series. At some point this is going to be the second-biggest amateur sporting event in the country next to the Olympics. That’s where we’re going, but to do that, you have to start building internally.”

Over the past few years, while he’s traveled the country working with young QBs, Dilfer and his staff also have been scouting private quarterback coaches.

Several of the men seated around the room were former NFL backups who had noted the “quarterback guru” boom and decided to put up their own shingles.

It was a niche business that had become a cottage industry catering to wealthy parents hoping that, with the right tutoring (at some $200 an hour), their sons could be the next Tom Brady. Or at least earn a $200,000 scholarship and be BMOC.

The guy sitting right in front of Dilfer in the middle of the first
row, twenty-seven-year-old Hunter Cantwell, spent three seasons in the NFL before being cut in 2011. Just ten feet from him was George Whitfield Jr., a San Diego man who once tightened up Cantwell’s mechanics and has since groomed everyone from Ben Roethlisberger to Cam Newton to Andrew Luck and been labeled by
Sports Illustrated
as “the Quarterback Whisperer.” From Ohio, Whitfield would fly down to Texas to work with his newest star protégé, Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel, the 2012 Heisman Trophy winner. Behind Whitfield was Craig Nall, a Dallas-based coach who’d spent five seasons as Brett Favre’s understudy with the Green Bay Packers.

Dilfer’s idea: to unify those coaches into his system, which was geared toward showing a quarterback a lot more than just how to throw a tight spiral.

The QB-guru biz has been around for decades. Dilfer, though, was the first guy who ever tried to franchise it. And he had the cachet, the resources, and the platform of
Elite 11
—and ESPN—to try to make it happen. His vision would become a reality in a little more than twelve hours. Its name: TDFB.

Billed as a “holistic coaching ecosystem that unites coaches & expands their influence,” TDFB’s rollout was doubling as Elite 11’s Super Regional at Ohio State. In addition to all the QB coaches in the room were: longtime NFL coach Norv Turner and his son, Scott, a wide receivers coach with the Cleveland Browns; the creators of eCoachSports, a video-analysis software system that conferences via camera, player, and tutor; the creator of Axon Sports, a high-tech, brain-training system geared to help quarterbacks process coverages faster; and Axon’s performance specialist, Joe Germaine, a former Buckeye and NFL QB who was the 1997 Rose Bowl MVP.

“Tomorrow’s gonna be epic,” Dilfer said. “It’s gonna be epic, because at the end of the day, the person who benefits the most is the kid.

“I don’t know if all of you totally get this. QB isn’t just the most important position in sports, but, ultimately, it’s also the most influential position in sports. What the dude with the ball does affects the lady in the office across the hall. It affects everybody. We’re talking about influencing the next generation of influencers. Tomorrow, we change the game.”

• • •

THE COACHES WEREN
’
T THE
only ones who had traveled long distances with big aspirations for the weekend at Ohio State. Brandon Harris and his family had driven almost a thousand miles from their home in Bossier City, Louisiana, to get to Columbus. Football experts in the Bayou State regarded Harris, at the time a 6′3″, 180-pound junior at Parkway High School, as the most gifted QB prospect Louisiana had produced in more than a decade. The Internet recruiting analysts from
Rivals.com
, ESPN, and 247Sports each regarded Harris as one of the top five quarterbacks in the Class of 2014.

Two months earlier, Harris had gone to the Elite 11 regional at the Dallas Cowboys practice facility and, by his own admission, struggled. The drills he was put through by the Elite 11 staff were new to him, he said. Harris graded his performance as a C. Harris, though, was optimistic that that weekend he’d earn a spot to the nationally televised Elite 11 finals.